The Orioles responded to being swept for the first time in two years by winning five straight and six of seven against the Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox. One-third of the way through the season they’re on pace to win 105 games.
Here are five things we learned from their week.
The Orioles have again built on their previous success, so let’s all calm down
We can’t state enough how wildly improbable it is for a team to improve by 31 games one year and an additional 18 games the next. That’s what the Orioles did from 2021 to 2023. Surely, their ascent had to halt this year, even if their growth as a World Series threat is ongoing.
Well, here we are at the one-third pole, and they’re on pace to win 105 games, four more than last year, with a run differential that tells us their record isn’t remotely flukey. They have a no-doubt superstar in Gunnar Henderson, with other members of their young core such as Adley Rutschman and Jordan Westburg delivering All-Star-level work. Corbin Burnes has given everything he was supposed to atop the rotation, which has also been deep enough to thrive in the face of injuries. The defense is often splendid.
The bullpen has been the shakiest element, veterans such as Cedric Mullins and Austin Hays aren’t hitting, and the Orioles are chasing the New York Yankees, who are on an incredible heater. But, hey, there aren’t any perfect teams.
The baseball season offers several handy mathematical guideposts at which, with simple multiplication, we can gauge a team’s progress. The 54-game mark is one of those — deep enough in that we have a good feel for the league but a small enough sample that plenty will be different by the end of September.
So let’s all say it together: The Orioles are one of the best teams in baseball.
It’s time for fans to stop panicking when they don’t hit for a few games or the bullpen lets a seemingly easy win get messy. Yes, there are spots on the roster that need fortifying. Yes, Baltimore would breathe easier if general manager Mike Elias trades for a lights-out reliever. But it’s time to let go of the anxiety that none of this is real.
The Orioles are really good. They know it. That’s what we’ve learned from 54 games.
Gunnar Henderson is your AL MVP front-runner
We talked early in the season about how Rutschman is the original seed for this Orioles renaissance, but Henderson is the one with the best chance to go down as an all-timer.
That only becomes clearer each week.
Henderson would be a great show even if he couldn’t hit a lick. Cal Ripken Jr. was the godfather of big shortstops, but he played the position with cool mastery. Henderson looks like an NFL free safety out there as he charges from the hole to behind second base with furious abandon. It was almost surprising when he didn’t pull down a base hit that he leaped for late in the Orioles’ latest victory over the Red Sox. Of course, he had already put that game away with a grand slam in the second inning. He’s on pace for 54 home runs, which would set a club record and put him behind only Alex Rodriguez on the single-season list for shortstops.
Last summer, as Henderson began piling up jaw-dropping moments, fans began to whisper that he might, someday, become the best player in the American League. Someday arrived much quicker than most of us anticipated.
Teammates recognize it.
“He does everything well,” said Burnes, who won the National League Cy Young Award in 2021. “He’s definitely been our top player this year, and I know a lot of these guys lean on him when they’re struggling at the plate.
A skeptic might ding Henderson for the .258 batting average or the 58 strikeouts, but those flaws are nothing stacked against the power, the defensive range, the effective aggressiveness on the base paths, the increased walk rate that has pushed his on-base percentage to .354.
Wins above replacement (WAR) is a problematic stat for many old-school fans, but it does highlight all-around excellence. Henderson is first in the AL in Baseball-Reference WAR and third in FanGraphs WAR, neck and neck with the Yankees’ sublime hitter, Juan Soto, and with another shortstop wunderkind, Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals.
Henderson is on pace for about 10 WAR, an informal threshold for immortal seasons (Ripken peaked at 11.5 in his 1991 AL MVP season, for reference).
With Soto and Aaron Judge bashing for the first-place Yankees and Witt leading the Royals to unexpected success, this could be a terrific awards race, but the Orioles finally have a player at the front of the pack.
Jorge Mateo is reminding us that a flawed player is not a useless player
When the Orioles called up Jackson Holliday in mid-April, it wasn’t clear what role Mateo would fill going forward. Henderson, the team’s best player, was locked in at shortstop, a spot Mateo owned in 2022. Colton Cowser was off to a hot start in Baltimore while Kyle Stowers and Heston Kjerstad raked for Triple-A Norfolk, making the outfield picture impossibly crowded. If Holliday thrived at second base, what would be left?
Holliday did not thrive, of course, hitting .059 in 10 games before the Orioles sent him back to Norfolk for more seasoning. With Westburg breaking out at third base, manager Brandon Hyde turned to Mateo at second.
He was ready.
Mateo has saved runs with his glove at a position he played infrequently before this season. “I don’t know if there’s a better up-the-middle combination honestly right now [with] the range both those guys have,” Hyde said of Mateo and Henderson.
Beyond that, Mateo has slugged better than .470 in May and run the bases with his usual elan. He has been a winning player.
A 100-win team needs its sluggers and its unhittable starters. It also needs players to patch the holes that inevitably open over a six-month slog.
Mateo is undeniably frustrating to watch at the plate when he’s scuffling. He finished each of the last two seasons with a subterranean .267 on-base percentage. His defensive performance last year didn’t match his Gold Glove-caliber work from 2022.
For the past month, however, he has been that perfect patch.
Kyle Bradish is about as nasty as a major league starter gets in 2024
Let’s cross all fingers and toes. Let’s knock on every piece of wood in the house. Regardless of whether you want the Orioles to win the World Series, we should all hope the ulnar collateral ligament in Bradish’s right elbow holds strong, because it’s a delight to watch him pitch.
His seven no-hit innings Sunday against the White Sox put an exclamation point on Bradish’s dominance since he came off the injured list at the start of May. In 25 2/3 innings, he has allowed just 16 hits and no home runs, and has struck out 34. Save for a few lapses in command that have jacked up his pitch counts, he couldn’t throw much better.
For all the (justified) acclaim heaped on this club’s young positional stars, there’s no better development story on the Orioles than Bradish, a fourth-round draft pick who had just posted a 4.28 ERA in High-A when he was one of four prospects the Orioles acquired for starter Dylan Bundy after the 2019 season.
“He’s got a very unique delivery, which can create some strong opinions about him one way or another,” Elias said at the time. “But he’s got four real pitches, all of which will show above-average at times, and he strikes out a lot of hitters. There’s a lot of things to like there.”
Even so, it wasn’t as if Bradish rocketed to the top of prospect charts. The Athletic’s Keith Law had him 10th in the Orioles’ system going into the 2022 season, when he posted a 4.90 ERA in his first shot at the major leagues.
Most of the damage Bradish absorbed was packed into his first 10 starts. Even as rookie, he proved to be an adaptable creature, and by last summer, teammates were comfortable calling him an ace.
He phased down his four-seam fastball (which cuts naturally) in favor of an even more dastardly sinker that has become his bread and butter. When Bradish really needs to finish a foe, he sends that pitch boring in at 96 mph. Given that hitters must also account for his 88 mph slider, which moves as much as anyone’s, it’s no wonder they’re batting a paltry .176 against Bradish. That would be the third-lowest batting-average-against in baseball if he had enough innings to qualify for the ERA title.
Burnes is the club’s No. 1 pitcher because of his track record and ability to pile up quality starts, but right now, Bradish is more difficult to hit.
Which brings us back to the UCL sprain that sidelined him to start the season and raised the specter of a more serious elbow injury.
Bradish has checked every box in rebuilding his arm strength, done everything he can to put that unsettling setback in his rearview. But given what we know about injury prevalence among top pitchers, the worry that his magnificence is unfolding on borrowed time will remain.
That should not distract from the sheer pleasure of watching Bradish torture major league hitters.
A no-hit bid and a wins milestone illustrate the difficulties of judging modern pitchers
For generations, we looked at no-hitters and career win totals as top-line measures of pitching greatness — the gold trimming on potential Hall of Fame cases.
Bradish carried a no-hit bid through seven innings and 103 pitches against the White Sox, and neither he nor Hyde considered the possibility he might go the whole way.
“No choice there, unfortunately,” Hyde said. “Just with 103 pitches, he hasn’t gotten that far and coming off of an elbow strain earlier and the whole thing, but yeah, it’s difficult because you want to see him stay out there and he’s throwing the ball so great.”
That will never sit well with fans who grew up in a different time for pitcher workloads, but Bradish probably would have needed at least 125 pitches to finish, and such outings are extinct from the modern game.
We saw another symptom of that change when Burnes reached 50 career wins Wednesday. He was self-deprecating about it, saying, “That was 50? It took a while.”
If we step back, however, it is amazing that a 29-year-old who has been one of baseball’s top starters for five years is just now hitting that milestone. Fifty wins was two seasons and a good April for Jim Palmer in the 1970s.
Burnes, who went seven innings in beating the Red Sox, has never pitched a complete game. That doesn’t make him worse than the greats of 50 years ago, who routinely won and completed 20 games a season. But it does mean the old Hall of Fame markers — 20-win seasons, 300 wins for a career — are hopelessly out of date.
It’s a different job now, with the goal to be more overpowering for shorter stretches.
Burnes probably won’t win 150 games in his career. Forget 300-game winners; 200-game winners are headed the way of the dodo. When we weigh pitching careers from this generation, we’re going to have to turn to different metrics.